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The Spectator

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Envoy to Combat anti-Semitism

The Albanese government this week appointed Jillian Segal AO as its Special Envoy to Combat anti-Semitism. That’s where the good…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Plight of the paramedics

Victoria’s public health services are crumbling

Features Australia

The coming populist revolt

The elites keep getting it wrong

Features Australia

Reform takes off

UK voters punish the Tories but don’t endorse Labour

Features Australia

Fifth column

Does high immigration pose a security threat?

Features Australia

Not-so-free speech

What price do we pay for pro-Palestine protests?

Features Australia

Panicking over Payman

Albanese government stabs Israel in the back

Features

Notes on...

The cult of the water bottle

The water bottle is no longer just a water bottle. It is a status symbol. It is an extension of…

Features

Notes from a bomb site

Kyiv For weeks, Kyiv had felt relatively safe compared with just about everywhere else in Ukraine. People had adjusted to…

Features

Can Labour solve our prisons crisis?

There is no doubt that the new government (and in particular the prisons minister, James Timpson) is faced with a…

Features

Trade like a tradwife

I love to complain about my phone. It has ruined everything, from friendships to childhood to my memory. But if…

Features

Starmer must move fast without losing his head

When Keir Starmer’s Labour party gathered on Monday to celebrate their election victory, the difficulty was finding a big enough…

Features

The secret diary of Sue Gray

Once we entered Downing Street a No. 10 protocol adviser took Vic upstairs to show her the facilities in the private…

Features

Don’t bribe your dog with treats

‘Do NOT look Lulu in the eye. Keep your voice low and soft and ignore her barking. Do NOT make…

Features

The C of E needs to talk about sex

My friend Andy is getting married. It’s about time – he and his girlfriend have a one-year-old daughter. He wants…

The Week

Diary

The worst thing about losing my seat

Magpies have long been thought to be birds of omen. I am not superstitious. Yet during the election campaign I…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week: Starmer’s first steps, Biden’s wobble and Australia’s egg shortage

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, appointed several ministers who are not MPs, but will be created life peers.…

Leading article

Why don’t international laws apply to Russia?

The Kremlin has denied it targeted the Kyiv children’s hospital that was struck by a missile on Monday. It was…

Letters

Letters: what Biden and Ronaldo have in common

True conservatism Sir: Douglas Murray claims that the Conservative party ‘will need to have some people who are actually right-wing’…

Columnists

Any other business

How safe do you feel boarding a Boeing?

‘They knocked down our old house in three hours,’ says a friend who has embarked on what he says is…

Columns

The new dark age

We have entered a new dark age. I’m not just referring to the situation in Britain since last week. Though…

Columns

The great bee-smuggling scandal

The principal concerns of the electors vary rather more widely than the pollsters and pundits would suggest. One man in…

Columns

Who will lead the Tories next?

Rishi Sunak performed a mea culpa when his shadow cabinet convened on Monday, taking full responsibility for the election loss.…

The Spectator's Notes

What the Tories got wrong on housing

Sir Keir Starmer may be our first atheist prime minister, but his manner in parliament resembles that of what, in…

Columns

Why was Jeremy Hunt SHOUTING AT ME?

Robert Jenrick, once immigration minister and still, just, MP for Newark, said on Sunday that the Tories lost not because…

Books

More from Books

How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria

The craze for photographic cartes de visite that swept Victorian Britain was further boosted by the Queen’s own enthusiasm for the format

More from Books

Notes on the natural world: an exquisite collection from Kathleen Jamie

In short essays and poems, the Scottish makar explores our connections with nature, always mindful of the insignificance of human time compared to the deep time of stones

More from Books

Why state bureaucracy is crucial to our happiness

With politicians increasingly sabotaging the machinery of government worldwide, our only protection lies in the civil service, judiciary, police and security services

More from Books

Could anyone be trusted in Tudor and Stuart England?

An investigation of the codes, disguises and invisible inks used by plotters and spymasters captures the paranoia of an age when secret messages could be hidden anywhere

More from Books

The downside to being rich: Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, reviewed

A rollicking family saga set on Long Island revolves around the kidnapping of a wealthy businessman and the effects of it on his wife and children

More from Books

At last, a private education that wasn’t unmitigated misery

Robyn Hitchcock describes how his musical tastes were formed listening, aged 14, to Dylan, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix on the school gramophone at Winchester

More from Books

A haunting apparition: Bonehead, by Mo Hayder, reviewed

A young policewoman returns to her native Gloucestershire, hoping to solve a mystery connected to a terrible past accident there

More from Books

Richard Flanagan rails against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’

‘Why do we do what we do to each other?’ he asks, citing among many atrocities the dropping of the atom bomb and the genocide of aboriginal Tasmanians

More from Books

The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’

Matthew Lockwood traces Britain’s long history as a haven for refugees and argues that the nation has benefitted greatly over the centuries as a result

Lead book review

Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn

Even the most liberal-minded reader might be surprised by the amount of crack cocaine, LSD, alcohol and casual sex the poet indulged over the course of 50 years

Arts

Australian Arts

A masterful magnificence

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? culminates the great stretch of American drama that runs from Tennessee Williams’ The…

Television

Utterly bog-standard: BBC2’s The Turkish Detective reviewed

A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama.…

Cinema

Acceptable for a hangover day: Fly Me to the Moon reviewed

Fly Me to the Moon is a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum set during the 1960s space…

Opera

Sparky and often hilarious: Garsington’s Un giorno di regno reviewed

Hang out with both trainspotters and opera buffs and you’ll soon notice that opera buffs are by far the more…

Theatre

Unmissable – for professors of gender studies: Alma Mater, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

Alma Mater is a topical melodrama set on a university campus. The new principal, Jo, (amusingly played by Justine Mitchell)…

Exhibitions

The beauty of pollution

On the back of the British £20 note, J.M.W. Turner appears against the backdrop of his most iconic image. Voted…

Arts feature

Why I fell out of love with Wagner

It’s four years since I gave up opera criticism. The pandemic had struck, I had hit a significant birthday, and…

Dance

Are the best young ballerinas being lured away from dance by sport?

As graduation ceremonies go, the Royal Ballet School’s annual matinée ranks among the most spectacular. It takes place at the…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

I’ve just watched Senator Fatima Payman’s performative ‘I quit but not really, I’m moving to the crossbenches’ media conference. It…

Aussie Life

Language

Angry people keep chanting ‘Free Palestine’ on our streets. They shout that ‘Palestine’ should stretch from the Jordan River to…

Food

48 hours of food in Andalusia

In Spain, you can eat all day – and we did. Earlier in the summer, I spent two days in…

Spectator sport

Murray shouldn’t have relied on injury-prone Raducanu

Talk about raging against the dying of the light: Andy Murray and President Biden both. Murray because he is no…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: is it rude to listen to sport at a wedding?

Q. We live in the countryside, where the door is always open. Last week when it was sunny we had…

No life

Next time, I’m swimming to Calais

Friends in Calais invited me to their baby’s birthday party. He’s a year old. They suggested an overnight stay and…

Real life

Drama on the London Underground

The girl lay slumped against a wall in front of me and someone ran to push the emergency button. I…

The turf

Politicians have to be gamblers

Politicians pretty well have to be gamblers. You give up a promising career in, say, dentistry, teaching or accountancy for…

More from life

How to make perfect scones

I am evangelical about scones as a gateway bake – they are the perfect entry point for the nervous baker.…

No sacred cows

What Labour could learn from Australia and New Zealand

I’m just coming to the end of a four-week speaking tour Down Under and have spotted some worrying signs of…